The city of Madison hosted the 15th annual national White Privilege Conference last week at the Monona Terrace to discuss issues of white supremacy, social justice, education and the Tea Party. The MacIver Institute attended multiple breakout sessions and will be releasing our highlights over the next couple days.

Our first account comes from the breakout session titled Stories from the front lines of education: Confessions of a white, high school English teacher.

The session was facilitated by Kim Radersma, a former high school English teacher in California and Colorado. Radersma is currently working toward her Ph. D. in critical whiteness studies at Brock University in Ontario, Canada.

For the love of God, Kim, please go find something more productive to do. Anything. Hoe weeds, paint your trim, clean your gutters, vacuum the house, iron clothes you never even wear any more. Critical whiteness studies?!? There was a whole conference on this?

I didn't finish the article. You can if you want, but all I want to do is reach for normalcy and embrace it with deep passion.

Thanks, Drew. I really needed that.

Special note for the SLOBs: Dig that the Tea Party is somehow tied into White Privilege.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Why are YOU even dignifying that conference by posting about it? You should be posting stuff that is more entertaining, if not hopeful-- a tiny ray of sunshine (below), amid all of the bad, despressing and celebrity-clogged news stories today:

Well, hey, I'm engaged in a Critical Whiteness Study myself, what's the problem? It seems that a company is producing feedstock for ceramic manufacture, but they want to make whiteware, and the minerals are too brown, so I'm working on processes for removing the iron so that we can reach the critical level of whiteness . . .

What's that? You say that's not what they meant? Whoops. Sorry about that.